The purpose of this course is to explore the complex interrelations between food and culture, focusing on the questions of how people in different world socio-historical contexts learn and accept to eat and cook food differently, and how the social purpose of food consumption has changed hierarchically, spatially and temporally, entailing different social and cultural meanings. To this end, the course is organized around two main axes: (i) the diffusion and transformation of eating and cooking practices parallel to world-historical changes, and (ii) food consumption patterns and their relation to social hierarchies. Some of the themes to be covered in this class are the cultural and social significance of eating-out, gendered aspects of food practices, the emergence and evolution of "national" and "ethnic" cuisines, cultural and social histories of certain food products such as sugar, coffee and Coca-Cola, culinary transformations and interactions across the world in a historical perspective, homogenization of diets on a global scale, and the historical development of rituals and manners associated with food consumption.